Through the Haze, Some Light
The morning sun wasn’t yellow.
Rather it was a dulled reddish- orange, made that way by smoke from millions of acres of wildfires burning in Canada last week.
I took out my phone to take a picture.
A couple of kids walked by. Is that the sun or the moon, one asked.
I confirmed to them that, despite appearances, that was indeed, the Michigan sun.
Last week I and three other adults, Miguel Rios, Lisa Muras and Darlene Brothers had the pleasure of helping chaperone 10 local high schoolers from the Hostyn and Plum parishes for a week of service work in the greater Detroit area as part of the Catholic Heart Work Camp program.
Us locals were part of about 200 others from around the country who came to sleep on air mattresses at St. Fabian’s High School, shower at the Farmington Hills YMCA, and in between fan out to various places that needed some help.
Nine years ago the Catholic Heart Work Camp organization actually brought hundreds of teens to La Grange to help in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.
So I guess we’re just trying to return the favor.
Time and again, last week, our group from Texas was sent to homes of older folks who needed work done on their houses.
As one of the camp directors said, “you’re going out to places where people think God may have forgotten about them.”
But a lot of the heavy lifting we did was done in between the trash hauling and the brush clearing.
As much as these folks might have needed their house cleaned or their door fixed – they really just wanted to know someone cared.
They needed someone to talk to.
That’s when I saw the differences between 80-year-olds from Detroit and teens from Texas disappear during lunchtime conversations on living room carpets or water breaks on back porches.
We spent a morning at the house of Bryan, a widower whose wife gambled away all their savings before she died of a heart attack in a casino.
We spent an entire day working at the home of a woman, Denise, who was living in the house she grew up in, having moved back to take care of her father in his final years. Now she was trying to hold onto the house by herself. To clear brush at her house we used dusty tools that belonged to her dad that had probably been hanging up in the garage since he died 10 years ago.
Detroit was once the fourth largest city in America as folks from all over the U.S. flocked here to work in the then-booming auto industry. The gritty town’s motto is still “The Motor City.”
That’s how one lady we met, Fay, came to live in the Detroit suburb of Troy, after her childhood in Kentucky.
We spent all day working at the house she’s lived alone in since her husband died years ago. She was so excited we were there that she ordered Little Caesar’s Pizza (which is headquartered in Detroit by the way) for us for lunch. She ate with us outside and we all drank ‘pop.’
Her neighbor T.J. even took the day off work to help, and worked beside us all day.
“I would have loved doing this kind of thing when I was a kid,” he said.
Since reaching a peak of 1.85 million at the 1950 census, Detroit’s population has declined by more than 65 percent.
Other than T.J., Fay said she hardly knows any of her neighbors anymore.
All that wildfire smoke was starting to roll in the day we were at Fay’s house. She was 86, used a walker, and according to the news reports about all that haze from Canada, she probably should not have been outside that long in those conditions.
But she wasn’t going to miss a minute.
All the kids hugged Fay before we left.
Time and again, all week, the folks we met were amazed at the kids – how hard they worked, how selfless they were.
I can’t help but think that kind of thing becomes contagious – more contagious even than the cases of poison oak some of us came home with as a souvenir.
Our final day in Detroit, Friday, was a free day after a closing Mass at St. Fabian’s.
Fay had given us lots of ideas for fun things to do. At her recommendation, we went to Belle Isle, a huge park that sits in the Detroit River and on a normal day affords a great view of Canada just across the water.
It was little hazy, but we could see across the border.
We even met a lot of Canadians and corralled them into taking a photo – Canadian geese.
There was a news crew on Belle Isle doing a story about the wildfires and how so many local events were being cancelled because of them.
They interviewed the kids for a couple of minutes and Pharen Muniz talked about our week here, what we had done, and, yes, we’d had to take precautions because of the smoke, but how we’d kept going anyway.
Sometimes the haze gets so thick it’s hard to see things clearly.
When that happens, you just need a little help to see the sun.